The Schwartz Report

LANDesk and Heat Software Merge into Ivanti

After acquiring four companies over the past several years to extend beyond its core specialty of PC patch management, LANDesk has combined with Heat Software and the two companies effective today are now called Ivanti.

Heat Software is a SaaS-based provider of IT service management (ITSM) and endpoint configuration and control tools that are part of private equity firm Clearlake Capital's portfolio of companies, which earlier this month agreed to acquire LANDesk from Thomas Bravo. Terms weren't disclosed, through The Wall Street Journalreported the deal is valued at more than $1.1 billion.

While the individual brands will remain, at least for now, Ivanti is now the new identity of the combined company. Steve Daly, LANDesk's CEO, will lead Ivanti. By combining with Heat Software, Daly said it will accelerate LANDesk's ability to move from traditional endpoint management software into offering its products as SaaS-based tools.

"At LANDesk, historically we've been slow to the cloud," Daly acknowledged during an interview following the announcement of the deal. "From a Heat perspective, what it brings to us at LANDesk is first and foremost, their very robust cloud platform. First and foremost, that for us was the main strategic reason for this deal."

Daly said Heat has invested extensively over the past several years on bringing its ITSM tools to the cloud and he added that Heat offers a workflow engine that can manage endpoint lifecycle management. "That's really where the power is," he said.

LANDesk has a long history as a provider of patch management software but Daly has looked to extend its portfolio, most recently with last year's acquisition of AppSense, a popular provider of endpoint virtualization software. The other two companies under LANDesk's umbrella are Shavlik, which provides a broad range of security, reporting and management tools that include a System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) add-in module, and Wavelink, a provider of mobile modernization and mobile enablement tools.

The combined company offers a broad range of offerings, ranging from privilege and patch management, security, IT asset management, ITSM, password control, desktop management and what Daly described as a complete suite of device management and reporting tools. Bringing together the two companies comes as Windows has more security and self-updating features, and the task of managing endpoints is now falling on both IT and security teams, Daly said.

"Because a lot of the management techniques are getting easier, the OS is building more and more management into the platform. It's really about how you secure that end user environment," Daly said. "This is particularly acute at the endpoints because the endpoint is such a dynamic environment, whereas the datacenter is pretty static and well controlled. Our endpoints change every day, as we download stuff or as we add content."

Going forward, Daly said he believes that the profile technology it uses for Windows 10 migrations and building support for mobile devices will become a key factor in delivering a so-called "digital workplace" because of the end user activity the platform gathers. "If you lose your laptop and you need a new one, bang, you don't lose anything -- we just grab your personality that we've watched and stored."

Microsoft updated an August security advisory this week to urge organizations using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol in supported Windows systems to implement some configuration changes manually.